Survivor Tells of Massacre at Kosova Village (NY Times)

By ANTHONY DePALMA

KUKES, Albania -- It lasted no more than three minutes, three minutes of savagery unleashed without even a word. "They just started shooting and I got hit in the shoulder. The dead bodies behind me pushed me over the cliff and into the stream. I was lucky because all of the dead bodies fell on top of me."

Isuf Zheniqi, who said he survived when 58 men died in a massacre near Bela Crkva in southwestern Kosova more than a month ago, speaks out hesitantly, fearing Serbian forces might take revenge on members of his family still in Kosova.

But after crawling out from under the bodies of his relatives, neighbors and friends, with a bullet from a Serbian automatic rifle embedded in his right shoulder and horrors filling his head, he has carried around the names of almost all the men who died that day.

In crimped handwriting he puts them down on the pages of an address book, name after name of old men, young boys, teen-agers and men, like himself, who were suspected by the Serbs of belonging to the Kosova Liberation Army, which is fighting to make Kosova independent from Serbia.

He remembers the names of all but one. But he knows there were 58 because he helped bury them, each one with a written name.

As refugees from Kosova continue to flee across the border, the accounts of atrocities committed by Serbian forces in Kosova multiply: a killing spree in the village of Velika Krusa, the rampage of troops through the streets of Djakovica, the slaughter of up to 100 men in the village of Meja.

Accounts from different refugees are consistent enough to lend a great deal of credibility to some of those accounts. But eyewitness accounts by survivors like Zheniqi are rare, either because the killing was done efficiently enough to prevent survivors, or because the sheer terror of minutes like those on the embankment at Bela Crkva prevents survivors from recounting their ordeals.

Zheniqi said that when he was brought across the border by relatives he told human rights investigators what had happened at Bela Crkva. But until now he has not given journalists a full account his experience.

Human Rights Watch separately interviewed Zheniqi and four other witnesses, who corroborated parts of his account.

Zheniqi was the only one who testified that he saw the actual killing, Human Rights Watch officials said. Four women who were separated from the men at Bela Crkva heard the shots as they were walking to Zrze and later returned to see the bodies.

And other refugees told Human Rights Watch that they were among the group of 20 or so people who returned the day after the killings to bury the bodies.

"All the witnesses gave us highly credible and unusually consistent accounts of what happened at Bela Crkva," said Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch. "They corroborated what the eyewitness told us."

The other witnesses appear to have left Kukes since they were interviewed. It was impossible to confirm the killings independently, beyond the refugee accounts, since reporters and independent investigators have been unable to visit that area of Kosova since the bombing started.

Today Zheniqi lives in a Kukes pool hall, with his daughter and her family. He cannot use his right arm because of the bullet wound, and during the days he can often be seen dozing in the sun outside the pool hall, trying to steal some moments of the rest that eludes him every night because of his terrible dreams.

"My daughter tells me 'Father, sleep, why don't you sleep?' " Zheniqi said. "But I can't. All those dead bodies on top of mine. When I meet someone from Kosova and they ask me what happened, I cry. I'm embarrassed, because I'm 39 years old and I'm crying."

The slightly built farmer, who worked for eight years in Switzerland before returning to the fertile soil of southwestern Kosova, said that before the turmoil in Kosova began over a year ago, he had almost no contact with Serbs living nearby.

But the area was a known stronghold of the Kosova Liberation Army, and the Serbs were advancing ruthlessly on rebel positions, including the area of Bela Crkva. Zheniqi said that he was not a member of the rebel force and that none of those killed had any connection to the Kosova Liberation Army.

About 3:30 a.m. on March 25, on the first night of NATO bombings in Yugoslavia, Serbian forces started their operation, Zheniqi said. He said he saw about a dozen Serbian tanks take positions in Bela Crkva. "One was in front of my house," he said. Anticipating violence, he took his family and his brother's family -- 17 people in all -- and ran to the nearby mountains to hide.

When the streets again fell silent, they returned, thinking the tanks had moved on. But they hadn't. Smoke soon rose from the houses of Bela Crkva that were closest to the road from Prizren to Rahovec. Zheniqi and his family fled again, this time scrambling down the deep banks of a large nearby stream. It was about 4:30 a.m.

"The people from the whole village started to collect there in the stream," he said. They went to a place he called Ura e Bellase, where a train trestle crossed the stream. About 800 villagers tried to hide beneath the bridge.

After daybreak, the villagers tried to move toward Zrze and Rogovo, two nearby hamlets they thought would be safe. But Serbian snipers followed their movements. About 9:30 in the morning, Zheniqi said, 16 special policemen appeared, shooting their automatic weapons in the air. Two families had strayed from the group and Zheniqi said the Serbs opened fire, killing every member of both except for a 2-year-old boy who had been protected by his mother.

"She hid the baby in front of her and saved him," Zheniqi said. His lips quivered and he could not talk. When he continued, he said, "I saw this with my own eyes, maybe 150 feet from me."

The Serbs then shot their rifles in the air again and shouted, in Albanian, "Get up and come here."

The villagers climbed up the banks of the stream with their hands over their heads. When they reached the train trestle, the men were separated from the women and children, and ordered to strip down to their undershorts.

The police then went through their belongings, Zheniqi said, taking anything of value. A local doctor trainee, Nesim Popaj, tried to talk to the police in Serbian because his nephew, Shendet Popaj, 17, had been thrown on the ground and was under a policeman's boot.

"The Serb looked at the doctor, said just two or three words, and told him to move over a bit," Zheniqi said. "Then he shot him. We were shocked. The man was a captain, using an automatic rifle. He wore a green camouflage uniform, and on his shoulders were stars. I don't know his name, but he was tall and he had a scrunched-up mouth. I could recognize his picture easily."

The women and children were sent to Zrze. The men were allowed to get dressed and then were forced to move over to the high ground above the steam. Zheniqi was in the first line, at the edge of the stream bank, with many men behind him.

"We tried to say something to the Serbs but they didn't let us," Zheniqi said. "If we tried they just said, 'Shut up.' We all cried. Sahid Popaj cried from the moment we were forced to take off our clothes to the moment he died. He just cried."

The shooting started without a word from the policemen. Several of them standing just behind the villagers opened fire with automatic weapons. Being farthest away from the gunmen provided Zheniqi with some cover, but he was still struck by a bullet in his right shoulder. The shooting lasted about three minutes, he said. The weight of the men falling behind him pushed him over into the stream.

He fell about six feet, landing in the water. "At that moment, I was just thinking of getting to one stone and from there holding my head above the water. I stayed there like a dead man for a total of maybe 20 minutes."

The terror had not ended. The policemen lowered themselves down the embankment.

"I heard someone telling a guy in the stream: 'He's breathing, shoot him; he's breathing, shoot him,"' Zheniqi said. They found nine men who had hidden themselves in the bushes, and killed them.

He waited another 15 minutes, and when all was quiet he pulled himself out from under the weight of his dead friends and relatives. That was when he saw the extent of what had happened in Bela Crkva. "There in the stream, I saw terrible things: men without eyes, men with half their heads blown off."

He staggered to Zrze, where he found some of his family and told them about the killing. He said the men organized a group to go back to the stream, but Zheniqi was not among them. He said they found four other survivors, and piled them into the wagon behind their tractor, dodging sniper fire. On the way back, two of the survivors died.

The following day, about 20 villagers from Bela Crkva returned to the stream to bury the dead. Already, they were thinking of justice and the memory of those who had been mowed down in three minutes.

"We wrote the names of all the dead on separate pieces of paper," Zheniqi said. Then we put the papers inside plastic soda bottles. There was one name in each bottle. We put the bottle inside the grave, not on top. And we buried them, not far from the stream."